CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-34720 — Cisco Ios Xr security vulnerability

High CVSS 8.6

A vulnerability in the IP Service Level Agreements (IP SLA) responder and Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP) features of Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause device packet memory to become exhausted or cause the IP SLA process to crash, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. This vulnerability exists because socket creation failures are mishandled during the IP SLA and TWAMP processes. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specific IP SLA or TWAMP packets to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust the packet memory, which will impact other processes, such as routing protocols, or crash the IP SLA process.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-09-09
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
operating-system
Weaknesses
CWE-771

Affected products

  • cisco / ios_xr

Showing 1 representative product identities from 27 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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